Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38

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Heffer, Simon (5 September 2021). "Will I marry again? Or shall I live with Peter?". The Sunday Telegraph . Retrieved 5 September 2021. At the Berlin Olympics Channon had been a ready dupe for Nazi propaganda and was entirely taken in by a visit to a labor camp, repeopled for the purpose with “smiling and clean” eighteen-year-olds, “fair, healthy and sunburned.” But the diaries make horribly clear that his excitement at Nazism also fed on his own anti-Semitism, expressed in a casual, lurking contempt for Jewish friends such as Philip Sassoon and the Liberal MP and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha: a semi-sedated prejudice easily reawakened. He records grotesque fantasies of shouting “Heil Hitler!,” on one occasion at a Jewish businessmen’s dinner in his own constituency. To a reader amused by the social whirl of the diaries, such things make disturbing reading, but Heffer was right to leave these and other even more offensive things in, not only for the fullness of the portrait but because they help explain the widespread British reluctance to take Hitler’s genocidal program seriously. The diaries are candid. “There’s an awful lot of drinking and drug-taking – not necessarily by him – but it’s a very decadent society he moves in,” said Heffer. Most of his friends don’t work for a living. “They are the idle rich. And he looks at it and he’s not censorious, but he describes it in great detail.” Disgracefully, none of this appeared in Rhodes James, who seems to have been working from a bowdlerized, often redacted, and sometimes rewritten version given him by Channon’s last lover, Peter Coats. To have agreed to work under those circumstances was profoundly unprofessional. That same frankness tells on Channon’s politics, though. He’s an intolerable, pro-appeasement bore on the subject of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and his political views are frequently inexcusable (as late as March 1938 Channon wrote, “I hate society at the moment: it is too fanatically anti-Hitler”). Despite—or perhaps because of—all that, his entries remain vivid and propulsive. His energy appears to have been unflagging, because almost every day finds him recounting some party or another and who said what to whom—and what they really wanted to say instead.

The King has become known as RS, rubber stamp, as Winston has absorbed all power and is, in fact, a virtual dictator… There is some speculation as what will happen on Wednesday next when the Conservative Party meets to elect a new leader in Neville’s place; in all probability everything is rigged for Winston to succeed! Good-looking, charming, and possessed with social grace enough to warrant invitations everywhere, Channon set about recording his life with such diligence that one understands that he saw it, and not politics, as his real career. After all, this was a man who blandly recounted burying his diaries alongside Fabergé eggs to protect them during the war. I drove in the afternoon with Honor to her farm: the crater caused by the bomb – it must have been a 1,000-pounder – is really immense. All my suspicions and distrust of Honor’s bailiff, a Mr Woodman were revived. He is insolent, swaggers about, and treats her with scant respect. She allows herself to be so familiar with that sort of people. I think I am wise in saying nothing; usually she tires of them. But I foresee trouble with that man; serious trouble, probably financial.Peter and I had a rapturous reunion. He told me that he had fixed it for Palestine: ten days’ leave and [we] are off at dawn on Sunday. The world is a lovely, lovely place.

Channon is never explicit about his relationship with Coats but it is highly probable that it was at times an actively homosexual one – stigmatised by its illegality, which ended only in the year of the diaries’ original publication. Coats, a fastidious man, was certainly not ready to reveal that relationship to a wider world, even had Channon’s family wanted him to. The English society that Chips was a part of is done with Belgrave Square. Today, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska occupies Chips’s old house at No 5. The neighbours mostly have foreign names. And the son of a former KGB operative and, one is tempted to assume, crony of President Putin has entered the House of Lords as a British parliamentarian, a man who throws Gatsby-like parties. Sometimes I think I have an unusual character – able but trivial; I have flair, intuition, great good taste but only second rate ambition: I am far too susceptible to flattery; I hate and am uninterested in all the things most men like such as sports, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war, and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels. I am an excellent organiser and have a will of iron; I can only be appealed to through my vanity. Occasionally I must have solitude: my soul craves for it. All thought is done in solitude; only then am I partly happy. [33] Channon never made it in politics. The peak of his achievement was to be parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, when he was under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office (explaining the appointment of this rich, social climbing ninny to sceptical colleagues, Butler said it reflected his need to attach a first-class restaurant car to his train). Nor were the two novels he wrote much cop. His real genius was for friendship (though some of those on whom his happiness depended secretly thought him spurious and toadying). “Yes,” says Heffer. “His friends loved him. He was unstintingly generous, and desperately keen to be liked. He found people fascinating, though I think he was rather lonely, too.” But it is, of course, political Channon for whom we really turn to the diary. He was at the epicentre of the pro-appeasement wing of the Tory party and high society, and at the heart of the abdication crisis. The earlier version of the diary disguised just how enthusiastic he was for the fascists, as were many of those around him. For much of this period, Channon was a fashionable anti-Semite, who feared above all a socialist revolution and the murder of the aristocracy, perhaps by guillotine.Are there revelations to come in future volumes? “Oh, yes,” says Heffer, delightedly. “He has an affair with someone very famous in volume three.” To what degree was Channon open about his sexuality? He and his longtime companion, a landscape designer called Peter Coats, lived together, didn’t they? “You are jumping ahead, Miss Cooke, if I may say so. But no, they weren’t an out couple. Their friends knew, but there was a conspiracy of silence. After the war, attitudes became much stricter. During this period, don’t forget, Lord Montagu was sent to prison.” (In 1954, the peer was convicted for inciting homosexual acts.) In his comments accompanying the published selection, Rhodes James stated that "Peter Coats edited the original MS of the Diaries." [30] He also stated that Coats arranged the preparation of a complete typescript of the Diaries as Channon's handwriting was often difficult to read. [31] Coats also carried out an initial expurgation before the editorial discretion exercised by Rhodes James. [32]

In March 1938, the rising Conservative minister Rab Butler, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office appointed Channon his Parliamentary Private Secretary. [4] Butler was associated with the appeasement wing of the Conservative party, and Channon, as with the abdication, found himself on the losing side. In the words of the ODNB: "Always ferociously anti-communist, he was an early dupe of the Nazis because his attractive German princelings hoped that Hitler might be preparing for a Hohenzollern restoration." At the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Channon attended the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, where he was very impressed. [18] In the 1960s many of the people he wrote about were still alive and could have sued for libel. “There will be people whose reputations will be damaged when this comes out,” said the historian Simon Heffer, who is editing the diaries in three volumes. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, contemporaries of Channon’s, are written about at length in his diaries. At one point, he notes, "I don’t think Wallis would be content as the consort of an ex-King: the situation would be untenable." Bettmann // Getty Images Colville, John. The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, Volume 1. London, Sceptre, 1986, ISBN 0-340-40269-5

Nor is he exactly faultless on the detail. He gets it wrong on some titles and flags. He constantly gives people’s ages and is wildly out, sometimes by as much as a decade: Heffer’s wryly corrective footnotes are themselves a minor pleasure.